Then, Magic was about pursuit,
dominion of this and that, binding angels and bar tricks,
stealing fires, self hip gnosis, slight of hand
living a life in one night, smashing it to bits by dawn’s early light.
Begging, broken, anything but blessed. how far can one intentionally fall?
citing detachment, impermanence, apocalypse,
using “who do you say I am” head trips
to confuse followers and friends in some appropriated
bodhisattva bullshit with a ‘carpe diem’ twist.
Now, Magic is about survival,
side-stepping destruction, protecting my own, without tipping the scales, bind runes and banishings, foraging and charting, walking patterns, worship forgotten gods living focused solely on staying alive while striving to celebrate.
Trying to stay present, to build something that will live on
knowing that the circle never ends, and now,
that the infinite fires are not a destination
but the fuel we carry within us ‘round the sun.
Suits Smashing Pipes Privatization, suspension of democracy and the destruction of infrastructures
February 8, 2016
This weekend, I was included in a social media discussion that questioned the cost of fixing the pipes in Flint and why they couldn’t just switch back to Detroit water immediately. This post was written in response and reflects some of the information shared in the subsequent discussion. As I stated in my response, there are many who are working more closely on this than I and I’m hoping that they will correct me if I’m sharing misinformation.
My understanding is that when Snyder switched Flint to the more corrosive Flint River they did not treat the water with anti-corrosive chemicals that apparently coat the pipes and prevent leaching of materials (lead) into the water.
So, yes, they can just switch to Detroit again, and they actually have, but now the pipes are damaged due to the untreated water and the infrastructure, unless PVC (plastic), needs to be replaced to every tap on the system.
Note: just like our nations electrical grid is in dire need of update, our water infrastructures across the country are dangerously near failing. Flint’s tragedy is starting to bring more and more cities into the light. Flint is just the tip of the iceberg.
As water systems are privatized, the corporations that run them are engaging in tactics to damage the infrastructure and then shift the cost to the city and state, ie public funds toward the repair of a now private system. (a current trend, see: Hockey Arena, M-1 rail, etc).
So, for Flint, the thing to watch is where the ownership of the water system lands. Who ever owns it is going to eventually have a fancy new water system all paid for by a man-made emergency and the poisoning of residents.
Here in Detroit with massive inhumane water shut-offs and foreclosures, the funding strategy has been to damage the pipes going from the main to the house. In my personal experience, damaging the pipes at the shut-off box, when turning on/off service to the house. In order to get our ‘auction’ house back ON the water system we had to pay $1K in permits and pay a contactor $3.5K to tear up our street to put in new pipes from the main to the house.
Basically, after a water shut off or a foreclosure, In order for anyone to live in the house again they have to replace the pipes, shut-off box, from the house to the main and eat the cost themselves. Of course, the Detroit system is now run by a quasi-public/private authority, the Great Lakes Water Authority.
In the case of water-shut offs on low/no income residents, in addition to encouraging them to move out and subjecting them to health/social trauma, they are shifting the cost of infrastructure repair to the next owner once it is flipped. It’s pretty brilliant from an evil nerd perspective, maximize attrition and profits. Emergency management has proved its efficiency in atrocity and austerity.
Sadly, I’m beginning to see this and similar efforts as ‘textbook’ Disaster Capitalism strategy. In Detroit, the man-made crisis was a engineered financial emergency that was used to justify the suspension of democracy called ’emergency management’. The suspension of democracy, and from a racial lens, displacement of the black power structure in our municipal governance, brought on the bankruptcy. The bankruptcy facilitated the redistribution of funds and resources from public to private en mass.
Interzone/Detroit – To say that the Master Musicians of Jajouka are a seminal influence doesn’t really fit. Their ‘pipes’ are something akin to thread in my material and aetheric/energetic linings. I cut my trance ritual teeth with ‘Brian Jones Presents the Pipes of Pan at Joujouka’ as the soundtrack. A cassette tape was ‘passed’ to me, in a rather ceremonial way, on my first visit to Chicago, 89 maybe? The cassette eventually became the baseline of sound experiments/rituals that would find me layering ‘boom box’ upon ‘boom box’, upon static blaring TVs and hand made loops to the point where the pipes were the only things left appearing even remotely human. Last night, I revisited many of the spaces/places that I’ve connected with while working with these amazing sounds. Gratitude.
Video – Bachir Attar/Master Musicians of Jajouka live at TRINOSOPHES June 9th, 2014
Thank you for your interest in the Democracy on Wheels bus!
Democracy on Wheels Project: a mobil class room, resource center and art space. Brought to you by D-REM: Detroiters Resisting Emergency Management.
Description
Invite the bus to your neighborhood to host a conversation about Emergency Management – What is it, How does it effects the city, How can we TAKE BACK and RE-INVENT Democracy at the neighborhood level.
The people of Detroit voted against Emergency Management (Public Act 4) in November 2012. In March 2013, Gov. Snyder ignored the people’s voice by passing Public Act 436, reinstating Emergency Management , with no way for the public to repeal it!!!
Under the unchecked rule of Kevyn Orr Detroit is facing…
PRIVATIZATION of WATER
SELLING OFF of ASSETS (Belle Isle, DIA artwork)
BREAKING of union contracts
TAKING of pensions
all to pay creditors and banks at the expense of the people of Detroit.
The time has come to UNITE, ORGANIZE and CREATE a new system BY THE PEOPLE and FOR THE PEOPLE.
“One has the moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.” -MLKjr
Updated & Re-edited May 16, 2014 and added voice over: RUIN PORN is an art movement that focuses on the decline of cities, buildings and infrastructure, specifically capturing urban decay and VACANCY. DETROIT and other post-industrial cities around the world are popular subjects. RUIN PORN has been widely criticized for exploiting other’s economic and social hardships while fueling a post-apocalyptic vision that disregards historical and social context, a tabula rasa or ‘blank slate’.
In Detroit, this vision, these ‘blank slate glasses’ justify a lawlessness and often unrecognized inhumanity that supports not an end to corruption, but merely the transference of corruption from one set of hands to the next. With some analysis and honesty, it can become apparent that there are long-term overt and covert strategies at play here. In governance, Emergency Management being one of many examples. In development, Detroit Future City’s strategic ‘winners and losers’ is another.
The population of ‘losers’, the anticipated and engineered losses, those left behind and their outrage, anger or inability to cope, for whatever the reason, are then used to justify the creation of a high-tech private surveillance infrastructure that protects investments through numerous private policing authorities that have vast and overlapping jurisdictions and little accountability, save to their corporate guidelines.
DETROIT DEVELOPMENT/SURVEILLANCE PORN is a visual meditation/mediation on history, power, surveillance and the displacement of people that strives towards a creative commentary on and counter-expression to RUIN PORN. It strives toward documenting the ABANDONMENT and VACANCY of humanity that is interwoven in CORPORATE DOMINATION of our experience.
ORIGINAL DOCUMENTATION:
Good Afternoon Detroit and all.
This morning’s Meditation/Mediation has bleed into the afternoon. It carries forward from the weekend’s focus on resurrection and relationships. Yesterday, I took advantage of the holiday to shoot some “b-roll” for a project and do what I used to call a ‘walkabout’, a visionary moving/walking/sitting mediation through ‘Gillyville’, the area of downtown owned by Dan Gilbert.
This is an attempt at portraying the sterility of surveillance and corporate dominance of the landscape in a way that contrasts the drive-by, objectification of abandonment and vacancy that frames what has been identified as ‘ruin porn’.
For me, it’s also an expression of the heavy-handed, top-down approach to development currently, and historically, applied in Detroit. My intention was to commune with the space in a different way, from a different perspective, listen to the buildings and the angles/angels.
When I worked for Compuware in the 00s I would spend smoke breaks walking through all the alleyways, learning what was behind the structures, the ‘backside’ of the system, mapping the relationship between what is seen and what is not. So much has changed in the past decade.
Yesterday, I was able to reconnect to that aspect of my intuition, to that ‘soulful’ work that lead me to an awareness that Detroit, being built on a ‘straight’, a waterway connecting two larger bodies of water, and due to this, is an elemental (land/water) crossroads, a portal for transformation, a sacred space, a powerful node in the aetheric/energetic realm. I thank my makers for bringing me this far.
Due to the energetic qualities of this work I couldn’t sleep last night. This video emerged as a rather random and rough document of what I saw and heard. Being spontaneous and random, there are a ton of ‘mistakes’ that make me cringe, but there are others that raise hairs. I close with this poem/invocation of elemental energies from 2003.
Much Respect and Gratitude.
Promethean Night, a curse on angels
I remember watching as the city burned amazed and awaiting ever august Detroit made devils night as she did Valliants and Galaxies
Burning Prometheus rising planting apocalyptic dreams in virile minds to seek vengeance and let loose on landscapes
I now watch crass angels in suits move clean machines across the lucid Vulcan dreamscapes of once infinite possibilities broken glass and pavement cracks allow breath, oxygen to burn
I curse sterile attempts to polish and smother and command Prometheus rise again!
*This was written in my cubicle while working at Compuware, ‘Angel’s/Devil’s Night’, October 30, 2003. It was either part of the impetus for, or grew from, my involvement with the Detroit Promethean Society, which is a story for another time. ~ ed. Sept. 2012
Suits Smashing Pipes
Interzone/Detroit – To say that the 
Updated & Re-edited May 16, 2014 and added voice over: RUIN PORN is an art movement that focuses on the decline of cities, buildings and infrastructure, specifically capturing urban decay and VACANCY. DETROIT and other post-industrial cities around the world are popular subjects. RUIN PORN has been widely criticized for exploiting other’s economic and social hardships while fueling a post-apocalyptic vision that disregards historical and social context, a tabula rasa or ‘blank slate’.